Throughout Italo Calvino’s novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler, he contemplates and tries to understand is what is important about books and why people continue to read. He does not just emphasize that what is inside a book is important but he also looks at the actually book itself. As the short stories continue to change titles and authors, Ermes Marana asks “does the name of an author…matter?” (101). Ludmilla goes so far to say that authors themselves do not matter either because she finds that “the real [author] never corresponds to the image” she has formed in her mind (186). Other characters also suggests that writing a book in a different language can alter the power of the text like Ukko Ahti who supposedly found “the Cimbric language” gave him “his genuine inspiration for [his] novel” that the Cimmerian language did not (75).
Not only are the books important, but why people read, the different reason why they do so, is also important. In the novel, Professor Uzzi-Tuzii, suggests that reading “is always this:…a solid material object which cannot be changed” (72). However, I do not think that the other characters view books as unchangeable, for they all get something different out of it, which may not be what the author intended. Silas Flanner believes Lotaria has only read books “to find in them what she was already convinced of before heading them” (186). Lotaria also explains that she see books only as “the recording of certain thematic recurrences, certain insistences of forms and meaning” (186). She does not have to read the entire book to understand it but counts the number of times certain words appear to gain an overall idea of what the book is conveying.
Readers at the end of the novel all have different ideas about reading as well. One reader actively reads and can only be interested in books if he “cannot follow it for more than a few lines” because “the text suggests” to new thoughts (254). Another reader finds reading as a way to find “revelations and illuminations” (254). They read because they desire something that they are trying to find. It may be that all their books lead “to a single book” or they search for “a book that perhaps does not exist” (256). What are main reader realizes through his journey of novels that never end is something different. He wants to “read only what is written…to connect the details with the whole” but he “especially likes books to be read from beginning to end” (256-257). One reader suggests to him that stories end in either death or marriage. And after the main reader has gone through his journey, he decides to end his story by marrying Ludmilla.
I’m glad you highlighted Ludmilla’s thoughts about “the author.” It’d be worthwhile to compare the way authorship works or is talked about by the characters in Calvino’s novel with the way Foucault discusses the “author function” in his article. In some ways, I wonder if one function of the author is to pull together—to cohere—all those types of readers that appear in If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler.